Laptop for school and mild gaming.

pewpew1moartime

Estimable
Feb 27, 2014
4
0
4,510
I'm looking at Dell's Inspiron 15 (non-touch), the specs are:
-4th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-4200U processor (3M Cache, up to 2.6 GHz)
-Windows 8.1 (64Bit) English
-15.6 inch LED Backlit Display with Truelife and HD resolution (1366 x 768)
-4GB 1 DIMM (1X4GB) DDR3L 1600Mhz
-500GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
-AMD Radeon(TM) HD 8670M 1GB DDR3

Would like to use this for some programming, and occasionally some Lan Parties. Is it able to run games like Dota2, TF2, L4D2 without putting too much stress on the system?
 
Solution
$679.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834231455

I hope you don't plan on using these laptop as very portable option since 5lb for portable everyday walking is going to be a pain. Speaking from experience here, I'm a college kid with a 5.4lb laptop, I ended to just let it sit in my room cuz it's so much pain to carry it around.
My suggestion if you do want to go portable is to just get a laptop with Intel HD 4000+ and it should be able to handle those games at low settings. I can also give you a suggestion if you want this option.

IDontUnderstand

Honorable
Dec 29, 2012
165
0
10,660
$679.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834231455

I hope you don't plan on using these laptop as very portable option since 5lb for portable everyday walking is going to be a pain. Speaking from experience here, I'm a college kid with a 5.4lb laptop, I ended to just let it sit in my room cuz it's so much pain to carry it around.
My suggestion if you do want to go portable is to just get a laptop with Intel HD 4000+ and it should be able to handle those games at low settings. I can also give you a suggestion if you want this option.
 
Solution

pewpew1moartime

Estimable
Feb 27, 2014
4
0
4,510
Haha, actually I have a pretty good desktop at home with a 660ti Jetstream graphic card, so my purpose for the laptop is really for it to be a secondary computer. If I were to opt for light machines, they wouldn't be able to run games like minecraft and tf2 without overheating, right? (without blowing my budget, of course)
 

IDontUnderstand

Honorable
Dec 29, 2012
165
0
10,660
I would go with the one that costs $599
It's got 14' monitor with 1600x900 display, which is pretty nice.
I5-4200M with Intel HD 4600, 8GB of RAM
4.4lbs, rated 6 hours of battery life
1TB of storage, you can look into buying a SSD and use the 1TB as external.
If you're worried about gaming performance, Intel HD 4000 is capable of playing casual games @ 720p medium settings with no problem, so I'm expecting 4600 to be able to handle 900p at medium or low settings. (Dota2, TF2, and L4D2 are not very demanding.)

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/z-series/z410/